Nourish Your Biblical Roots

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:08):
Shalem from here in the Holy Land. Welcome to the
Nourish Your Biblical Roots podcast. I'm your host, Ya l Estein,
President and CEO of the International Fellowship of Christians and Jews.
Each week, we'll explore the Jewish roots of your Christian
faith and nourish those roots with inspirational insights and ancient

(00:29):
teachings that are so relevant to our lives. Today, let's
get started, Shalem from here in Israel. On today's episode,
we're going to talk about the importance of recognizing the
blessings in our lives and giving thanks to God, even

(00:52):
and especially during hard times. Jewish tradition teaches that having
an attitude of gratitude is a essential in our service
of God, and also that it is a critical component
for living a joyful life, something we all want now.
I know firsthand that when we are going through difficult times,

(01:13):
it's not always easy to be grateful, but I've also
learned that it is always possible. In this episode, I'm
going to share some of the ancient Jewish traditions and
practices that help me maintain a grateful heart no matter
what is happening in my life. So if you are
ready to learn how to feel blessed and grateful no

(01:35):
matter what. Let's begin. The Bible versus that we're going
to focus on today are from Leviticus, chapter two, verses
four to seven, and this is what it says. If
you bring a grain offering baked in an oven, it
is to consist of the finest flour, either thick loaves
made without yeast and with olive oil mixed in, or

(01:59):
thin loaves without yeast and brushed with olive oil. If
your grain offering is prepared on a griddle, it is
to be made of the finest flour, mixed with oil
and without yeast. Crumble it and pour oil on it.
It is a grain offering. If your grain offering is
cooked in a pan, it is to be made of

(02:20):
the finest flour and some olive oil. Okay, this is
the Bible verse we're going to focus on. And like
so many Bible verses, you could read it at first
and say, what is the relevance to my life today?
But like all Bible verses, it is so relevant to
us today and to our lives. So let's start by

(02:43):
giving this Bible verse a little bit of context. This
week's reading discusses the various animal and meal offerings that
were brought in the Tabernacle and later on in history,
in the Holy Temple in Jerusalem. In Hebrew, the word
for sacrific or an offering is called a carban. It

(03:03):
comes from the Hebrew word of kharov, which means close,
and so very often from the original Hebrew what we
call in Hebrew lashon ha Kodesh the holy language. It's
holy because this is the language that God himself wrote
the Torah in, and that God himself gave to the people,

(03:26):
And so we can learn so much from this original language.
So when we hear that the same word for offering
or sacrifice is the same Hebrew word, the same root
that means to come close, it tells us something. The
purpose of the offerings was to bring people close to God.

(03:52):
So even though we don't bring karban note today the
offerings the sacrifices today, because we no longer have the
Tabernacle and we no longer have the temple standing in Jerusalem.
The Jewish sage is taught that these Bible verses which
deal with carbonote hold an eternal message for how we

(04:14):
can come close to God in our own lives. In
this verse that we're talking about the three different kinds
of offerings, it can seem like it's just something technical,
but the truth is that these three different type of
meal offerings, one that was baked in an oven, one

(04:34):
that was prepared on a griddle, and one that was
cooked in a pan. Each one of these different types
of offerings represent three categories of blessings. The offering baked
in the oven represents our daily bread or the basic
necessities for living. The offering prepared on a griddle is

(04:56):
associated with a sweet cake and represents sweet luck trees
in our lives, those things that we don't really need,
but that bring us extra comfort and joy. And the
third offering, the offering made in a pan, refers to
dishes cooked for special occasions, and it represents the momentous
occasions that occur throughout our lifetime milestones like getting married,

(05:19):
having a baby, finishing college, getting a new job, all
of these once or twice in a lifetime occasions. And
by mentioning these three types of offerings in the scriptures,
as we just read from Leviticus, chapter two, verses four
to seven, these scriptures teach us that we have to

(05:40):
cultivate our gratitude to God. In all three areas of
our lives that we just described, we need to recognize
our most basic blessings. This is the offering baked in
the oven are daily bread, the things that most people
take for granted, everything from the air we breathe, to

(06:03):
the food that we eat, to our ability to open
our eyes and see. The second, the griddle or the
sweet cake, represents how we also need to realize how
much God has given us beyond the essentials. Do you
have a car, a computer, heat in your home, something
beautiful that serves no other purpose other than to make

(06:26):
you happy. These are the extras that it's talking about,
and we need to open our eyes and to thank
God for these extras. And the third offering, which is
made in a pan, shows us that we need to
acknowledge the once in a lifetime blessings we have received,
not just once when they happen, but throughout our lives.

(06:49):
Have you been married, well, do you thank God every
single day for that spouse? Do you have children? Do
you think God every day for those children the day
that they were born? Or maybe grandchildren? Did God ever
bless you with a once in a lifetime vacation or
an amazing experience or friend that changed your life. Well,

(07:14):
how often have you gone back to that and said, Wow, God,
thank you so much for that once in a lifetime experience.
What these three different kinds of offerings are reminding us
is that first we need to acknowledge all the unique
ways that God blesses us, and then to thank Him

(07:36):
for all of the gifts in our lives. We have
to compartmentalize what type of blessing this is, and then
to use our words and recognition of thanks in that
specific way to make sure that we don't take anything
for granted. The first important lesson that we need to
take from this verse is that thanking God is part

(07:57):
of our service to God. Just just bringing the sacrifice
was service to God in ancient times. Just as they
didn't wake up back then and say, hmm, do I
feel like giving a sacrifice today or not? No, it
was something that they did because it was their service.
So too, we need to give thanks as our service.

(08:20):
It's not just something we do when we feel like
it or when things are going well for us. Even
in hard times, we are obligated to find something that
we can thank God for at the very least of
our lives, for the gift of another day. The first
thing that I do when I wake up actually is

(08:40):
to say a prayer, a morning prayer called mode Ani,
which is called grateful am I. The first thing I
do when I open my eyes is to say these
words before I say good morning to my husband, before
I say good morning to my children. I open my
eyes and I say mode It's one of the first

(09:01):
prayers that my parents taught me, and it's one of
the first prayers that I taught my own children, because
when they come to wake me up in the morning,
I lead by example. I say these words out loud.
I open my eyes and I say the words to
the prayer, which is I am thankful before you Living
King for mercifully returning my soul to me for another day.

(09:24):
Great is your faithfulness. This is something that sets the
tone for my entire day. When the first thing I
do and I open my eyes is say grateful am I,
and I'm talking to God. Suddenly I realize that every
second is a gift. I look at my children and

(09:46):
instead of saying, oh my gosh, I'm so tired, why
couldn't they have slept longer, I say, wow, what a gift.
It sets the tone. And you know in Hebrew the
words really should be animod I am grateful to you God.
But no, no, no, the prayer says grateful am I,
because the first word that comes out of our mouth

(10:08):
shouldn't be me, I am grateful. No, no, the first
word should be grateful am I. When we open our
eyes every morning, if our first thought is it's too early,
I'm so tired, that's going to set our day. Yet
if our first thought and our first words are wow,

(10:28):
I am so grateful for you living King, for returning
my soul to me for another day, that's what our
day is going to represent. And I think that it's
only right to give these words our prayers to God
first thing in the morning. If someone saved your life,
would you not be overflowing with gratitude towards them? How

(10:51):
much more so we must thank God, who gives us
life and gives us life with every breath we take.
The more we recognize our blessings and God is the
source of our blessings, not only the happier will be,
but the closer that we will feel to God. The
other message embedded in this Bible verse that we're going

(11:14):
over today and explained by the Jewish sages, is that
in order to properly express our thankfulness to God, it
isn't enough to offer a broad, oh thank you. True
gratitude requires us to pause and to think and to
recognize the breadth and depth of all of our blessings.

(11:36):
How often do we have something happen in our life
that we just turn up our head to God and say, oh,
thanks God, and then we move on, Or maybe even
in life with our family members, how often do we
come home and say, oh, thank you so much for
making dinner, and then we just move on and we
eat it. How different would our relationships look if we

(11:57):
really stopped to see what that other person did for
us to come in, and instead of just saying thanks
for making dinner, or things for folding the laundry, or
thanks for going shopping for me, we really thought about
all the time and energy that they put into it.
Would our thank you look a little different if we

(12:18):
stopped and really put intention into it. The challenge that
we face today is that we have far more than
ever before, and yet people feel more lacking than ever.
Feelings of entitlement have replaced feelings of gratitude. Somehow, when

(12:38):
we don't expect something, we feel more thankful for it
the second we expect it. It's kind of hard to
feel real deep gratitude. Our society focuses on what we
lack instead of concentrating on our many blessings. And in
order to have an attitude of gratitude, dude, we need

(13:01):
to shift our perspective. A really powerful time that I
saw this was when I was at a presentation by
a man named tal Ben Shahar. He's a well known
Israeli professor of positive psychology, and he told everyone in
the audience to look at a picture that he was
about to put on the screen and to count the

(13:22):
amount of shapes that we see. We would be looking
at the picture for ninety seconds, and he said, ready,
gets it. Go. He put a picture on the screen
of a bus with children, and there was a little
tree next to it, there was a sunshine, there was
a street, and all of us spent those ninety seconds

(13:43):
counting as many shapes as we could. Now, after ninety seconds,
he said, okay, look at the picture, remember it, remember
the shapes, and then he closed the picture. Now What
was amazing is that instead of saying how many shapes
did you see, as we were all expected, he said
how many kids were on the bus. And suddenly all

(14:07):
of these people who are in the audience, adults who
are looking at a simple picture for ninety seconds, couldn't
say how many kids were on the bus. And what
he said, and what he taught us from that exercise,
is that we only see what we are looking for.

(14:28):
And sometimes what we're looking for is what somebody else
tells us to look for, like the shapes on the
picture that Professor Ben Schachart told us to look for.
But other times it's what society tells us to look for,
or what we've been trained to look for. And too often,
instead of looking for the positive, we're looking at the negative,

(14:53):
at what's lacking? What do I still need to buy?
What furniture am I missing? Why is the food in
my head not enough that I just want to go
out to eat, to buy something from a restaurant. I
need new clothes, I need new shoes. We're so focused
on what we're lacking, And what's sad is that our
happiness is directly connected to gratitude and our sense of

(15:17):
Gratitude is directly related to what we choose to focus on.
The decision that we make to either focus on what
we have or what we're lacking is ours, but first
we have to be conscious of it. The Hebrew word
for gratitude is hakarat hatov, literally translating into recognizing the good.

(15:42):
This term implies that we are not required to deny
or sugarcoat the bad stuff in life. We don't pretend
like it's not there. But at the same time, we
have to actively look for the good, to focus on
what is good and acknowledge the good by stopping, recognizing

(16:03):
and thanking God for it. It's all about perspective. I
face this every year when I go to Ukraine. You know,
in Israel life can definitely be hard. The cost of
food is significantly higher than in America. The cost of
living is hundreds of percents more. You can't get everything

(16:27):
in Israel that I am used to having growing up
in America. We don't have Costco, we don't have Starbucks,
we don't have Target, and of course there's the constant
threat of terrorism. There's so much to complain about, so
many hardships. But when I go to Ukraine, I see
what it really means to live in a difficult country.

(16:47):
I visit homes of elderly with no running water, and
suddenly something I never appreciated before, the fact that I've
running water in my house is the biggest blessing. These
elderly live with a well in their backyard that often
freezes over in the winter. They have no one to
help them. Ah. Wow, Well, in Israel, I have neighbors

(17:10):
who are always there to help me. How often do
I thank God for that? In Ukraine, I go to
see Bobby r where thirty thousand Jews were mercilessly slaughtered
during the Holocaust with no one to save them, And
then I look at my life in Israel, with a
Jewish army who does everything to protect me and my children.

(17:34):
Suddenly I realize, seeing someone who is so unfortunate, who
is so suffering, I realized how blessed I really am.
It restores my perspective so that I can see the
good and be thankful for it. In order to stay
focused on the good in our lives and to maintain

(17:54):
a grateful heart, we need practices and reminders built into
our daily life. Judaism is rich in those practices of
giving us the time and space and the words even
to express our thankfulness to God for some of the
most basic things that we otherwise would take for granted.

(18:14):
My parents taught these blessings to me. I'm passing them
on to my children, and I want to share them
with you. These are the practices and the blessings which
keep me in a constant state of gratitude. As I
already mentioned, Jews have a practice to thank God for
another day of life as soon as we open our eyes.

(18:37):
We say the modet on knee prayer, but you can
say anything that speaks to your heart as soon as
you open your eyes. The first thing that you think
or say, let it be a praise. Let it be
something that you're grateful for. Another thing that we do
is in our daily morning prayers. We include thanking God
for things that we might otherwise overlook or take as

(19:00):
a given, things like essentials, the ability to see, the
ability to walk, the clothing we wear. These are all
organized blessings that we say every single morning. Taking time
to focus on at least some of the many basics
that maybe you take for granted can help shape your

(19:22):
attitude for the entire day, as you're getting dressed, just
take a second to close your eyes and thank God
for those clothing. As you are listening to your child
or grandparent or parent or friend talk to you the
first thing in the morning, take a second just to
be so grateful that you could hear that you're surrounded

(19:45):
by people who are interested in speaking to you. None
of these things are given and throughout the day for
every different thing that we do. Jews have a tradition
to say no less than a hundred blessings a day. Yeah,
we have blessings for just about everything. And the reason
why is that it keeps us mindful of the blessings

(20:08):
from God that we otherwise might not notice or appreciate.
You know, before we put anything into our mouth, any
kind of food, we say a blessing, and that blessing
connects us to where the food comes from. If we're
eating a vegetable, we thank God for the vegetable from
the earth. If we're eating a fruit, we thank God

(20:30):
for that fruit from the tree. If we're eating bread,
we thank God for the grains of the earth. We
go back to the source, to the root and realize
that starting from a little seed until it got onto
our plate until it gets into our mouth. What a
journey it's gone through. And every step of the way,

(20:51):
God let that happen. We say a blessing after going
to the bathroom. We thank God for a functioning body,
because that too is no way a given. When we
hear thunder lightning, when we see a rainbow, when we
smell beautiful smells, when we see the ocean, there is
a blessing for every single one of those things. We

(21:15):
even say a blessing every time we put on new clothing.
Every time we eat a new fruit, or we celebrate
a new achievement, we say shehrianu the kiyamanu vihigianu las manhasse,
thank you Lord for sustaining me and bringing me to
this moment. Sometimes, my friends, we also just need a

(21:37):
full day to stop and reflect, to be grateful for
everything we have, and the Bible has even integrated that
into the routine. For that. God has given us the Sabbath,
the Shabbat. It's one day a week where Jews forever,

(21:57):
including what Jesus did, stop for one day on the
seventh day of creation, just as God stopped to see
what he created and saw that it was good. Well,
we two stop running after everything we want, We stop creating,
we stop buying for one day, and we take the

(22:19):
day to appreciate everything we already have. We pause to
appreciate our blessings for an entire day, and that reminds
us that even in hard times, there is always a
lot to be grateful for, family, community, and time with God.

(22:42):
In conclusion, Abraham Joshua Heschel, a renowned American rabbi, once said,
it is gratefulness that makes the soul great. We have
so much to gain from making gratitude a central part
of our lives. We need to be like King David,
my friends, who said in Psalms one thirty six, ho

(23:02):
do la shem qitov quili o la machasto give thanks
to the Lord, for he is good. His love endures forever.
There is always a lot to be grateful for if
we just choose to have hakarat hatov to recognize the
good in our lives and thank God for it, no

(23:25):
matter how small it is. We are living with the times.
This Bible verse is reminding us that we have to
stop and give praise for the little things along with
the big things. In life, for things that have happened
in the past, and maybe even for things that will

(23:46):
happen in the future. This message is meant for your
life this week. This is the week of giving praises,
so try giving thanks for blessings in each of the
three categories that we love learned about in connection to
today's Bible Verse, for your basic necessities, for your luxuries,

(24:07):
and for the most special moments and milestones that you've
experienced in your life. I hope that you will apply
some of the ideas that we studied together and that
it uplifts your week and transforms the rest of your life.
Thank you for listening to the Nourish your Biblical Roots podcast.

(24:29):
If you like what you have heard, visit me at
my biblicalroots dot org for more of my teachings, videos, blogs,
and books. You can also follow me on Instagram at
ya Elle underscore Xtein or on Facebook at Yea l Extein.
Shalom and see you next week.